Ben Affleck's third feature-length film, the terrifically suspenseful dramatic thriller "Argo," is the second picture to use Warner Bros.' 1970s logo in 2012. And like "Magic Mike," the Soderbergh film that employed the same logo earlier this year, it's an augur ...

Kevin James is one of those actors who is so featureless and bland that he makes Tom Hanks seem, in comparison, positively exotic. With his doughy figure, dad-next-door face, and line delivery that suggests he's getting ready for the next big football game instead of commanding movies that cost tens...

You have one chance to figure out what “Gayby” is about. If you said “gay baby,” ding ding ding, you got it! Or maybe it should be “baby with a gay,” but at any rate, “Gayby” treads the familiar narrative path of the contentious relationship between the single woman and her biological clock. Much li...

'Frankie Go Boom' opens with a home video from a long-ago washed-out suburban childhood, as Bruce tricks his brother Frankie into a pitfall prank that's both caught on tape and a trap for the two of them; flashing forward to adulthood -- or something like it -- Frankie (Charlie Hunnam) h...

The cinematic revolution in the Middle East over the last few of decades, led principally by a generation of Iranian filmmakers who've flourished creatively despite restrictions placed on them by the regime, hasn't necessarily carried over to every region. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is hardly known...

Martine (Olivia Thirlby), a 23-year-old New York artist arrives in LA to complete a short film for an upcoming exhibit. We see her embracing a lover in the airport parking lot and just before things get too carried away, she puts on the brakes and tells him that it was nice meeting him on the plane....

It would seem that following the success of "In Bruges," writer/director Martin McDonagh went to Hollywood -- and didn't like the experience. A meta riff on making movies, "Seven Psychopaths" is a sneering send-up of the industry that also revels in its action movie clichés. But if there is one thin...

From "The Lost Weekend" to "Leaving Las Vegas," portraits of alcoholics in the movies have tended to be a male-dominated affair, but there's an entire subgenre of inebriated female characters equally worthy of attention. Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence,&quo...

With great films from Steven Spielberg, Ben Affleck, David O. Russell, P.T. Anderson, Michael Haneke and more, this is starting to look like an exceptional year, in which a large volume of major Oscar contenders are also impressive for reasons that have nothing to do with their awards potential.

Argo places us so much in the middle of the furious crowd storming the American Embassy in Tehran -- and the captives inside who see it coming -- that the episode is viscerally frightening. Back home, the Hollywood players who create a fake movie as a cover for the CIA rescue mission of Amer...